Playlist (9 talks):
Tim O'Reilly: 9 talks that stretched my mind

By piecing together a complex ecological puzzle, biologist Willie Smits believes he has found a way to re-grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo, saving local orangutans — and creating a thrilling blueprint for restoring fragile ecosystems. NOTE: The core content of this talk has been challenged on a number of grounds. For details, and Willie Smits' response, please see "A challenge to Willie Smits' talk" below.

“I loved the deep systems thinking in Willie Smits' talk. If we want to get 'there,' we need to start here ...”

Can government be run like the Internet, permissionless and open? Coder and activist Jennifer Pahlka believes it can — and that apps, built quickly and cheaply, are a powerful new way to connect citizens to their governments — and their neighbors.

“‘Are we just a crowd of voices, or are we a crowd of hands?’ Jen Pahlka puts the notion of government participation in a new and powerful context.”

Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria "talk" to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry — and our understanding of ourselves.

“I found the insights in this talk fascinating; it completely changed my mental model of how illness comes about.”

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

Drug-resistant bacteria kills, even in top hospitals. But now tough infections like staph and anthrax may be in for a surprise. Nobel-winning chemist Kary Mullis, who watched a friend die when powerful antibiotics failed, unveils a radical new cure that shows extraordinary promise.

“I loved the way Kary combines his personal experience, folksy delivery, and clear teaching about a really important problem. And he gets across that Nobel Prize winners don't always come from the background you expect.”

What's the key to using alternative energy, like solar and wind? Storage — so we can have power on tap even when the sun's not out and the wind's not blowing. In this accessible, inspiring talk, Donald Sadoway takes to the blackboard to show us the future of large-scale batteries that store renewable energy. As he says: "We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big. We need to think cheap."

“This should be a model for all TEDTalks. Donald Sadoway is tackling an important problem, but he's also a master teacher, so we aren't just ‘wowed’ (as is so often the case), we come away having learned something new.”

Jeff Han shows off a cheap, scalable multi-touch and pressure-sensitive computer screen interface that may spell the end of point-and-click.

“It's easy to forget that there was a time before multi-touch displays. Here Jeff Han demonstrates the power of multi-touch when the iPhone was still nearly a year and a half away. It's a great illustration of William Gibson's dictum that ‘The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.’”